[ Democratization ] Irena Hadziabdic, the President of the Central Election Commission of Bosnia and Herzegovina, speaking at a seminar on population registration and increasing the accuracy of voter registers, Warsaw, 31 August 2011. (OSCE/Shiv Sharma) its “Strategy for the Establishment of a Unified State Population Register”, which envisages the computerization of residency and civil-registration services, the simplification of residency-registration procedures and the establishment of a system for data sharing with other public institutions. The guidelines also provided the basis for discussions with civil and residency-registration authorities in Prishtinë/Priština, in September, in the context of ongoing development of a population-registration system. Voter and Population Registration In many OSCE participating States, the quality of the population register directly affects the exercise of universal and equal suffrage, as voter lists are linked to or produced from them. The Office assists states in implementing recommendations made by ODIHR Election Observation Missions by helping them build efficient links between their voter lists and population-registration systems. ODIHR organized the seminar “Synergies between Population and Voter Registration: Implications for the Accuracy of Voter Lists”, on 31 August in Warsaw, which for the first time gathered representatives of OSCE participating States to present and discuss good practices in efficient data sharing between election and population-registration authorities in the compilation of voter lists. The seminar was attended by 60 participants, including representatives of 16 OSCE participating States and nine OSCE field operations, as well as from the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance and the EC-UNDP Taskforce on Electoral Assistance. In partnership with the Central Election Commission of Georgia and IFES, ODIHR also organized a roundtable on increasing the accuracy of voter lists, on 22 November in Tbilisi. The event, which brought together more than 60 participants from political parties, NGOs and international donor and development agencies, as well as local and international experts and representatives of Georgian media, produced concrete recommendations on policy measures to improve the accuracy of voter lists in the country. ODIHR Annual Report 2011 37